


To save someone, to save everyone

by LightDescending



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: M/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 00:36:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5269961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightDescending/pseuds/LightDescending
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harold’s fingers steeple in front of his mouth, up to the thin press of his lips. His eyes are avid watchers.<br/>You have to know what it’s like to hear someone get murdered and be unable to do a thing about it.<br/>There is so much that can go wrong.<br/>He never really grows accustomed to the fluttering panic he feels when he looks up to a monitor empty of his tall partner, when signal lost bleeds red light across his screen, when the Machine has to sift and sort and search and seek—no, he never grows accustomed to it, the looming sensation of it, how he braces and steels himself against unfathomable loss. How sometimes he can only watch when John goes somewhere he cannot follow, and has to trust that he’ll come back out – that he can give John a way back out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To save someone, to save everyone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starfoozle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfoozle/gifts).



_To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something to-_  
_gether, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a_  
 _man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a_  
 _man shivering in the flock of himself. These are some_  
 _choices_.

\- excerpt from The Language of the Birds (4), from “War of the Foxes” by Richard Siken.

* * *

_A man does work. A machine can, too. Power of agen-  
cy, agent of what? This is a question we might ask._

_What is a document before it’s a document? A noise in_  
_your head, a backstory. What makes a thing yours to_  
 _steal or sell or trade? That is a question, good question._  
  
\- excerpt from War of the Foxes (6), from “War of the Foxes” by Richard Siken

* * *

 “I don’t like firearms, Mr. Reese.” The words emerge testily, wary: they already recognize their own futility in some way. They circle the room, disapproving but keeping a distance. Perhaps he’s underestimated – no, that’s wrong, what he’s done is assumed that they could accomplish the tasks ahead of them with a minimum of reliance on the more violent of John’s old skills.

Foolish assumption. On the gun, John’s hands move assuredly. Over-familiar.

Harold knows he doesn’t have to like firearms in order for them to be necessary. And he did give John agency, after all.  

Metallic sound of a magazine scraping home, the well-oiled slide and snick when John tests the safety.

“Our opponents are going to have guns. I’d rather not meet them without one of my own.” Reese sights down the barrel, clicks the safety back on, quickly stows the handgun. His movements neat, sure, economical.  The back panels of his suit coat fall to conceal the holster easily and John straightens, twists. Finch finds his eyes tracking where he knows that the handgun could be found.

Underestimation. Assumptions. Aversions.

How lethally John carries himself, even just walking to the door. If you didn’t know what to look for, you would miss it.

The words alight on Harold’s shoulders, they go softly to whisper in his ears. _I don’t like firearms._  What are firearms in the hand of someone capable? In Reese’s hands, they become an extension of will.  _No unnecessary killing_ , a rule, a condition, an expectation. John’s eyebrow had lifted, his mouth quirked, but he’d acceded with the tilt of his head, a shrug, a nod.

Later, Finch finds Reese on the monitors. The Machine’s eyes track where the handgun goes, where shots are fired. To incapacitate. Men drop in front of the expression of his will – Finch’s will, to help, to offer assistance, to stop bad things from happening – and rock to and fro on the floor in agony. But alive.

Harold’s fingers steeple in front of his mouth, up to the thin press of his lips. His eyes are avid watchers.

_You have to know what it’s like to hear someone get murdered and be unable to do a thing about it._

There is so much that can go wrong.

–

Wheeler the first.

Clumsy, clumsy – Diane Hansen actually the perpetrator, and Harold frantically trying to keep tabs on developing events from the Library. The case a sharp beak peck-pecking at his fingers, angry talons scrabbling, Harold with his hands cupped around it whispering  _please, please, this is only the first, I am only trying to contain this-_

The leads that John feeds him are new angles of approach, but they keep slipping away from him, keep getting lost or leading to unforeseen outcomes. He is only human. He makes mistakes.

John disappearing with a handgun to his head into a black sedan.

Connection lost.

(Finch will learn that this is commonplace –  _I walk in the dark_ , John tells him once in a low tone, and Finch feels those words run a cold chill down the back of his neck, the prickle he gets when he knows he’s being watched by human eyes. The dark is a place Finch has been, but not a place he would ever go willingly. He never really grows accustomed to the fluttering panic he feels when he looks up to a monitor empty of his tall partner, when signal lost bleeds red light across his screen, when the Machine has to sift and sort and search and seek—no, he never grows accustomed to it, the looming sensation of it, how he braces and steels himself against unfathomable loss. How sometimes he can only watch when John goes somewhere he cannot follow, and has to trust that he’ll come back out – that he can give John a way back out).

And yet… all the background information in the world can let you know a person, but not understand them, nor predict what they’re capable of.

After all, he’d assumed too little of John Reese.

He underestimated.

He never asks about Stills and John neither confirms nor denies what must have happened. It becomes a form of compromise.

Still: he watches on the courtroom cameras as Hansen is led away, bewildered and enraged, in handcuffs.

Left of centre in his chest, a riot of bird’s wings flapping skyward; for the first time, his desperate wish fulfilled.

–

They aim each other:

Finch points Reese towards the numbers. 9 digits like coordinates. The solidity of a routine – the fast way to get to know someone. Cloning of phones, sound-bytes and whispers, surveillance bugs and cameras. John hones in on these things. His execution is far from flawless but it is consistently impressive, regularly surprising.

Reese directs Finch towards the information. To the names, the dates, the data. Finch chases down minute threads back to their origins, teases out the complexities of codes, untangles firewalls to access what lies behind them.

Finch discovers he is better than he knew at certain kinds of problem-solving.

_I can’t find them; I need to know where they went._

_Give me the license holder on a silver Camaro – Oscar Foxtrot Kilo Seven Five Three Six_

_The serial number is still intact on this shotgun – I’m going to read it out to you._

_What’s the fastest way through these side streets?_

_I need a way out, Finch_.

From the way John talks to him, there’s never any doubt in his mind of Finch’s abilities.  _I know you will_  runs implicit behind all of it.

What is trust before it is trust?

A shot in the dark.

–

Here is what Harold Finch did:

He hoarded wealth like bright baubles for years, an accumulation. He was skilled and brilliant and made a nest of that. He still called himself Wren back then.

The Towers fell and none of it seemed to amount to very much. So much straw and dust.

He will never forgive himself for not knowing that it had happened. You emerge blinking and watery-eyed from staring at a screen all day into a world swirling with dust and the wailing of a city, a state, a nation – the numb horror of it sinks into your bones. He started to carry himself differently then. His shoulders slanted under the weight that he  _had not known_. How could he not have known until hours after the fact? There comes a conviction in situations like that, an impossible promise to yourself.  _Never again_. He should have been paying attention. They asked him to find a way to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

_The people of New York – of the country – wanted to be protected. They just didn’t want to know how._

He applied himself. He didn’t know the cost of his decisions.

_We’ve already foiled half a dozen major terrorist plots._

Didn’t know what the price would be.

 _We didn’t build the Machine to save someone,_ he said,  _we built it to save everyone_.

Later he added those words privately to the long list of things that he carried on his shoulders. Still walked easy then, as though to deny that he was haunted.

Here is what Harold Finch did: he built a Machine. He named it knowledge, termed it  _prevention,_ gave it a million eyes and ears and the predictive power to recognize patterns that no one else could see. A Machine of infinite complexity and awe-inspiring competence. The thinnest thread connects a person to a premeditated act of violence.

He taught it the meaning of the words  _relevant_ and  _irrelevant_ , and tried to forget that there is the thinnest line between the two. That there was no equation to place value on the life of  _someone_ compared to  _everyone_.

He looked at the walls years later.

 _I am offering you a chance. To be there in_ time.

There were so many numbers. What John saw on their first meeting together was only a fragment, a fraction of the list. There was not room in the Library for every someone who had gone unacknowledged and unknown. He papered his home with photos. He added their faces to the things he gathered to himself. He forced himself to see them.  _Never again._ It was impossible to know what sort of trouble they were all mixed up in. It wasn’t as simple as slipping warnings to the people brought up in the form of untraceable messages, hints – no, not when _investigation_  was needed to determine whether they were the ones at risk or the ones who were the threat.

Too often they were the ones in danger.

It happened over and over again.

_You have to know what it’s like to hear someone get murdered and be unable to do a thing about it._

Here is what Harold Finch did:

 _Before we – before I found you, the numbers haunted me_.

He asked the Machine to help him find someone.

_You need a purpose; more specifically, you need a job._

The Machine did.

–

_I recognize, Mr. Reese, that there’s a disparity between how much I know about you and how much you know about me. I know you’ll be trying to close that gap as quickly as possible. But I should tell you… I’m a really private person._

–

He holds himself accountable for the following:

One – the safety of John Reese to the extent that he is able to assure it.

Two – their continued anonymity and invisibility, to the extent that he is able to assure it.  

Three – the provision of context and shape to the situations they involve themselves in. To give themselves something to go on.

Four – divesting the corrupt of their source of power, to strip it all away, and then to have them face consequences for the choices they have made, the misery they have caused, the damage inflicted, the death trailed behind them, the body count of their empires.

Five – minimizing the loss of life in the pursuit of their mission whenever and wherever possible.

Six – shouldering what he can.

Seven – financing their missions; utilizing his money as a tool towards a purpose.

Eight – the safety of those who become involved.

Nine – the wellbeing of the Machine.

Ten – never losing sight of his conviction: that those who treat human lives like a game of chess deserve to lose.

Eleven – never treating John (or Jocelyn, or Lionel, or any of the others) as mere extensions of will; never letting himself view anyone as expendable.

He is taken aback by the following:

The strength of what hope feels like, when it is found at last, when he cautiously realizes that they’d found exactly the right man for the job. When he realizes that they are accomplishing what they set out to do. The strength of what it feels like to have others joining in with them, being brought into the fold, of realizing that he isn’t alone.

–

What is trust before it is trust? A shot in the dark.

It has been months since they began their particular partnership and John still knows virtually nothing about him. He tells himself it is for his own protection. For the continued security of the Machine. For the protection of John – what he doesn’t know cannot hurt him. It becomes a form of compromise – he concedes bits of ground here and there, recognizing that they cannot function as a team without some level of vulnerability.

 _I don’t like firearms, Mr. Reese_.

John, walking across the top of a parking garage, collapsing to the pavement when the bullet catches him in the navel, spilling his arms out to the sides like the wings of something shot down from the sky.

For Finch, it is his worst fear realized.

He feels the weight of John Reese slumping against him, the weight of him trusting Harold to help, and he will carry this, shoulder this too.

There is so much that can go wrong.

He never grows accustomed to it, the looming sensation of it, how he braces and steels himself against unfathomable loss, and he realizes in that moment when Carter helps him get John into the car (he didn’t think she would), in the instant when she helps them get away, that this would be a loss he doesn’t think he could bear.

A handful of bills – a tool towards a purpose – tossed onto a medical tray. A man to whom Finch rattles off information supplied by the Machine because Finch requested it,  _stitch him back up, no questions, and you’ll be a surgeon again_. How he sits with his fingers steepled against the thin press of his lips, unable to prevent his body from angling forward towards John in spite of the very real pain it causes, his eyes avid watchers, his heart thudding fluttering feathers inside him, watching thread and listening to the clatter of sterilized tools against metal pans.

 _There are people we can’t afford to lose_.

His heart pecks away at his insides until he feels like he’s the one bleeding.

_You have to know what it’s like to see someone get murdered…_

He holds himself accountable for this.

_We didn’t build the machine to save someone…_

He looks up into the camera and tries to take comfort in the fact that that Machine is monitoring this too.

 _I am offering you a chance. To be there in time_.

He prays, and he doesn’t pray often, doesn’t know anymore who to pray to, that he arrived in time.

John wasn’t the only one who’d needed a purpose, after all.

–

“Are you worried about me, Harold?”

Finch watches Reese on his monitors, hears the slight rasp of Reese’s voice through the earpiece he wears. John looks up into the camera and it’s like he’s looking at Finch, and Finch lets himself smile a little, turns the sound of it in his voice into the easy sarcasm that they exchange regularly.

“Mind yourself, Mr. Reese. Keep your focus on the mission, if you please.”

“I consider myself flattered,” John says in reply, voice light.

Harold’s eyes track him as he turns towards the door. Behind the door, a stairwell shrouded in darkness, dimly lit.

“Be careful, John.” Harold murmurs.

“When am I not?” John responds, which is his way of promising he will be, and slips forward into the shadows.

(Finch trusts that he’ll see him return.)

**Author's Note:**

> I am like, only ½ of the way through season 1 but already heavily compromised. You have starfoozle to blame and/or thank for this turn of events and so I dedicate this piece to them especially. I am very excited to see how season 1 ends and to get caught up - in the meantime, have this, which is composed mainly of my preliminary thoughts on John and Harold's particular dynamic. It's also a bit of a character sketch for my favourite very important bird, Mr Harold Finch / Wren / Shrike / Crane etc etc.


End file.
